Handling digital reproductions of artworks

he senses are finding their way back into the art museum, but the way paintings are displayed is still constrained by their fragility. We explore whether it would be helpful to use the capabilities of digital technologies to create meaningful somaesthetic experiences with digital reproductions. We conducted an experiment with 19 participants, letting them handle physical paintings and 2D and 3D digital reproductions, while ranking them according to their personal preference. To discover which cultural qualities participants ascribe to artworks in light of their somaesthetic experience, we interviewed participants regarding their experience of ranking three setups. We found that participants regarded the 3D reproductions as having certain material qualities. We argue that by designing the somaesthetic experience of digital reproductions, it might be possible to bring back dimensions of the art experience that were lost with the development of the modern museum.